When you have a pitcher like Kershaw, a truly elite left-hander who has led the NL in ERA three straight years — including an insane 1.83 mark this season — there is no such thing as home-field advantage.

There is only a Game 1 victory. Location of the contest is irrelevant. It’s a footnote.

On Thursday night the Dodgers won the best-of-five opener, 6-1, at a not-sold-out Turner Field. Kershaw finished his seven innings with 12 strikeouts and six runners allowed. In case you were wondering, that’s a pretty good ratio. Kershaw became the first Dodger with 12 strikeouts in a postseason game since Sandy Koufax in the 1963 World Series.

On a related note, Clayton Kershaw is on schedule to become a free agent after the 2014 season, and Clayton Kershaw is about to be a very rich man. A filthy rich man. Magic Johnson, the NBA Hall of Famer who is part of the Dodgers’ ownership group, spoke to a handful of writers before the game about that very thing. “We know where we have to be,” he said, as reported by LA Times beat guy Dylan Hernandez.

You know where this is going.

It matters not that the Dodgers already have more money committed to their 2017 team than most franchises do to their 2014-15 teams combined. They’re on the hook for at least $20 million to four players (Adrian Gonzalez, Matt Kemp, Zack Greinke and Carl Crawford), and they have $17.5 million going to Andre Ethier, $8.2 million to Yasiel Puig and $7.8 million to Hyun-Jin Ryu.

And yet, Kershaw’s check is blank, aside from the signature written in the most permanent of ink. They’ll hand him a pen and tell him to fill in the amount. No way the Dodgers let him see the free-agent market. Zero percent chance.

In his five full seasons with the Dodgers (2009-13), Kershaw’s worst season ERA is 2.91. His worst hits-per-nine innings rate is 7.0. Among pitchers with at least 500 innings in those five years, Kershaw has the best combined FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) at 2.76 and the lowest opponents’ batting average at .201, is third with an average K/9 rate of 9.28 and is fourth in pitcher’s WAR at 27.1.

Kershaw was so good Thursday night that, by the third inning, the fans at Turner Field started offering up hopeful cheers on noisy foul balls on the wing-and-a-prayer chance they could will the baseball back between the white lines. He sapped the park's mojo.

At one point in the fourth inning, with the Dodgers up 37-0 — technically, it was 5-0, but it might as well have been 37 — Justin Upton fouled a ball behind home plate and a fan wearing Braves gear made a nice one-handed grab. Fans love to cheer their own when they make a play like that. It’s a universal stadium truth. In the first inning, that catch might have brought the house down. By that point, though, there was nothing more than a smattering of half-hearted claps.

Yes, he had a hiccup in the fourth inning — the Braves sent six men to the plate and scored a run to end his shutout bid — and his pitch count ballooned to 77 by the end of that frame, but he responded well, you could say.

“His slider became unhittable,” catcher A.J. Ellis said.

Kershaw struck out the side in the fifth, then fanned two more in the sixth and three more in the seventh. Including the strikeout of Andrelton Simmons to end the fourth, and nine of the final 10 outs he recorded were via the strikeout.

The Braves should have known where this was going. Actually, they probably did, and it still didn’t matter. The end result was inevitable.